17 Minutes
by tyrope
Summary: BoJack waits 17 minutes before calling the police.


"_Sarah Lynn? ...Sarah Lynn?" _

_\- 0:01_

The prerecorded narrator on the planetarium tape drones overhead as BoJack turns. She's slumped against him, eyes shut. He shakes her gently and her head drops, limp.

"Hey, Sarah Lynn…" A chill runs through him. It takes time to register in his drugged up, alcohol soaked brain, but when it does, his eyes go wide and he begins searching, desperate for any trace of life in her body.

_\- 0:02_

He holds her right wrist in his hand and gently feels with two fingers. He's never been good at things like this. He's not even sure where abouts on the wrist a pulse would be. Shouldn't it be in all of it since there's blood everywhere? He lets her wrist drop and leans in close to her, his ear almost touching her face. He tries to drown out the narrator and listen, shutting his eyes. He almost prays.

_\- 0:03_

"Oh thank god," he says to himself upon hearing her shallow breaths. The relief goes faster than it came when he's left to make the next step. He sits in the planetarium seat next to her for another minute.

_\- 0:04_

The artificial stars, specks on the ceiling and walls around him like a jury, bore into him when he slips Sarah Lynn's phone out of her pocket, unlocking her phone with her fingerprint. He can't remember his own number, so he goes into her contacts and calls himself.

_\- 0:05_

His heart is beating and he feels overly conscious of every thought that shoots through his head. He wants her to say something, to get up, to move, to tell him to suck a dick, dumbshit, and ask what the hell he's doing with her phone. Anything that would indicate a sign of consciousness or life.

The film narrator is talking about the infinite expansion of space and how there is likely to be an exact copy of Earth billions of lightyears away. BoJack wonders if that BoJack is as much of a fuck up as he is.

_\- 0:06_

There's no going back as he ends the call. He forces himself to look at her one more time to face what he's done. She's stretched over two of the cloth covered seats. Her brown hair is plastered to her face and smeared makeup is half on-half off. Her mouth is slightly agape. He doesn't want that to be the image that will come to mind when he thinks of her, but he knows it will be.

"I'm sorry, Sarah Lynn."

_\- 0:07_

Sarah Lynn was doomed to die as soon as she found the heroin in the glove compartment. No, she was doomed to die when he invited her on the bender, destroying months of sobriety.

It wasn't like this wasn't going to happen anyway - everyone expected it. Child star: Dead from Heroin Overdose! The tabloids had a story like it running every hour. Was it really even his fault? Maybe her fate was sealed the day she was cast for Horsin' Around.

_\- 0:08_

BoJack walks to his car, which is parked sideways and half on a curb right outside the building. He walks circles around it, thinking only about her unconscious body inside.

_\- 0:09_

She'd understand. She would do the same if he was the one with the BoJack heroin coursing through his own veins, half dead in a planetarium. Celebrities like them need to stay out of the spotlight, so he'll do anything if he can keep at least one of them out because as Ana Spanakopita told him, sometimes you have to save yourself.

_\- 0:10_

It would be too late anyway, he tells himself. He can't get in the headlines again. This isn't just some regular shitty thing he does on a regular basis. It's so much bigger than him than anything he can ever do to redeem himself. No one would ever look at him the same if they knew his part in this. He would lose everything, and then what would all of this have been for?

He needs to be better. He needs to get better and he still can.

_\- 0:11_

He begins driving - not far. He drives over several curbs. He keeps an eye on the planetarium entrance, making sure that no one goes in.

_\- 0:12 _

He empties his car of all of the bender evidence: pill bottles, cigarette butts, beer cans, fast food wrappers. He sweeps whatever miscellaneous powders he can find out with his hands. His car still smells.

_\- 0:13_

He drains the last bottle of bourbon he finds underneath the passenger seat and lets the taste linger on his tongue before throwing it into the nearest dumpster. It shatters against the side.

_\- 0:14_

He sits in the planetarium parking lot and rehearses what he's going to say to the officers when they arrive, lights flashing, siren wailing.

"I was at home when I got a call from Sarah Lynn. I thought it was weird because I hadn't heard from her in a while. She said she had taken some drugs. She was at the planetarium. She sounded... scared, so I said... 'don't worry. I'll be right there.' I stayed on the line with her for two minutes as I drove over here. She started drifting off during the phone call. I begged her to stay conscious, but when I arrived, I- I found her like this... and I called the police."

_\- 0:15_

"I loved Sarah Lynn. I would never do anything to hurt her. It was an accident. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I was trying to make amends. We were trying to do the right thing for once in our shitty lives. I was going to be better." He doesn't know who he's talking to. He's alone.

He wants to call someone, but knows he doesn't have anyone to call.

_\- 0:16_

Sometimes he wonders how he can consistently fuck up every single day, each one of his mistakes bigger than his last. It should be him in there, choking on heroin. She was a victim of Hollywoo. She had the rest of her life left. But him? He'd give anything to trade places with her. He should have protected her, been there when she needed him. But he failed because he didn't care and now she is just another shitty thing that he did that he has to live with for the rest of his life.

_\- 0:17_

He slides his phone out of his pocket, hands trembling as he unlocks the screen. He holds the phone up to his ear, closing his tired eyes as it rings once.

"This is 911. What's your emergency?"


End file.
